In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads—in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. — Jacques Barzun

Laziness?

Quid Nimis disputes my allegations of idiocy, and chalks Obama’s problems up to laziness. She makes an interesting case. But I wonder whether anyone who endures the rigors of a Presidential campaign can truly be called lazy.

If intellectual laziness is the issue, then, yes, I think it’s true of Obama and much of the Democratic leadership, which seems not to have had a new thought or insight since 1936. Since Keynes was widely thought to have been refuted by the stagflation of the 1970s, that means that the Democratic party has spent the past 30 years or so denying reality rather than analyzing and adapting to it.

It’s probably just that my daughter has strep throat right now, but the visual grosses me out! It makes me think of looking down her throat and seeing a slug. Yuck.

Well then. I think we’ve established definitively that we have just elected president a tanner version of John Kerry. Athletic, tall, and uhhhhh, present, at least until he became Senator and started campaigning for the top rung on the ladder. A living, breathing, catastrophic example of the Peter Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle).

I’m pretty sure even Keynes would say that the so-called stimulus bill in this case was not what he would have prescribed, but more in the vein of what Larry Summers said it would be: timely, targeted, temporary.

Did the Democratic leadership have a new thought in 1936? What was that thought? Stalin’s not a nice man? I Know you’re trying to be generous, but let’s not do it at the expense of history.

I think Obama had risen to his level of incompetence well before this! :) Where’s his record of competence in the Senate or the Illinois state legislature?

In thinking of 1936, I was thinking of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. That still seems to exert significant influence on the way the Democratic leadership thinks. But I agree with you that what Obama has done and is proposing to do is far beyond anything Keynes would have advocated.

But- he appears to be a very competent campaigner. It comes back to your point about the intelligence and the seriousness of the electorate, and I think that we are all getting an object lesson as to what happens when you apply a failed social policy (affirmative action) to a position of actual responsibility.